Category Archives: Culture

I have a new book out. It’s titled Pigs, Pork, and Heartland Hogs: From Wild Boar to Baconfest, and it covers the history of the 12,000-year association of pigs and humans. Early reviews are saying very nice things about it, such as “engaging,” “illuminating,” and “refreshingly thorough and fair.” I’d probably add, “tasty”–because these quirky animals are, and have been for a long time, the most common meat in most of the world.

Like my previous book, Midwest Maize, this book takes from through history up to the present day, offering insights into both how pigs are raised and how they wind up on our plates, as well as looking at some of the problems associated with raising pigs. Also like Midwest Maize, there are recipes–tasty ones that are iconic in the region that raises more pigs than anywhere else: the American Midwest.

So if you like food history and are interested in pigs, you’re in luck. For the next year, the publisher (Rowman & Littlefield) is offering “Friends and Family” a substantial discount off the cover price. More substantial, in fact, than the author’s discount. And since I consider anyone who visits this blog to be a friend, I’m offering the discount to you.

Order directly through Rowman & Littlefield at https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538110744 for a 30% discount on Pigs, Pork, and Heartland Hogs. Use promotion code RLFANDF30 at checkout for 30% off – this promotion is valid until December 31, 2019. This offer cannot be combined with any other promo or discount offers.

This recipe is for a soup that is a national favorite in Poland. A Polish friend told me it was a soup her mother had always made, but she had grown up thinking of it simply as a soup mom made, rather than a specifically Polish dish. She was delighted when she learned that it was actually not just part of her family but also a reflection of her heritage.

As with most venerable recipes, there are myriad variations. About the only things all seem to have in common are split yellow peas (the groch in grochówka), celeriac, and some sort of smoked pork product (ham, slab bacon, salt pork, Polish sausage, or some combination of these). Most versions also include onion or leek and garlic. Some versions have carrots, some have potatoes, some have both, some have barley instead of potatoes, and some include parsnips. In other words, you have some leeway to customize this, based on what you have on hand. It is a thick, hearty, warming soup that freezes well. With the traditional accompaniments of rye bread and butter, it makes a good meal. Enjoy.

Cover the split peas with water and leave them to soak overnight. If you forget to set them out, cover with hot water and allow them to soak for at least a couple of hours. When ready to make soup, drain and rinse the peas.

In a large stockpot, fry the salt pork until it is beginning to brown and has given up a good bit of fat. Add the onions and garlic, and cook gently for five minutes. Add the celeriac, and cook for an additional five minutes, or until the onions just begin to take on a bit of color.

Add the peas and bay leaf to the vegetables in the pot. Add eight cups water, and bring to the boil. Skim any foam that rises to the surface. Reduce heat and simmer for 40 minutes. Add the potatoes, marjoram, and black pepper to taste, and simmer for an additional 20 minutes, or until the potato is soft and peas have pretty much dissolved. Toward the end, stir frequently, to avoid scorching the soup. If the simmer has been too vigorous, and the soup appears to be turning into a solid, add a bit more water. Taste for seasoning, adding pepper as needed (with salt pork, it’s unlikely you’ll need to add salt). Serves 6.

Alternatives: Just in case you can’t find really meaty salt pork, or would like other options, there are some alternate approaches to preparing this dish. You could use two or three strips of regular bacon to render fat for sautéing the veggies, and then save the bacon strips to crumble over the soup before serving. Without the salt pork in the water, you’ll need to use either a meaty ham bone or, if you have no such bone, 8 cups of ham-flavored broth. (They do actually produce ham bouillon powder.) Add the bone to the water before you start boiling, or use the ham broth instead of water. That will flavor your broth, but to add some meat to the finished product, add a generous cup of ham cut into bite-size pieces, or you could slice and brown a pound of kielbasa. Add this when you add the potatoes. No matter which variation you pick, it will still be authentic!

When we speak of celery in the United States, we are generally thinking of those thick, juicy, crisp-but-stringy stalks with a flourish of leaves on the top. While that’s the most common form of celery here, it is not the only variety.

Chinese celery, also known as smallage, par-cel, and cutting celery, is closer in form to wild celery. It has skinny, hollow stalks, a much stronger flavor, and is almost never eaten raw, but is rather used to add flavor to cooked dishes. The Italians differentiate between cooking celery and eating celery, the eating variety being the one we know best, and the cooking variety actually just being the skinny, strong-flavored wild celery.

Then there is the homely but wonderful variety known as celeriac. Celeriac is not grown for its stalks, but rather for its large, gnarly, brown, turnip-like root. You may see it identified as celery root, which is not inaccurate, but it is not the root of the kind of celery you’re seeing on crudité platters.

Celery is a marshland plant that appears to have originated in the eastern end of the Mediterranean. It was cultivated and spreading long ago, and appeared in everything from India’s Ayurvedic medicine to Egyptian tombs.

Sacred in ancient Greece, it was worn by winners of the Nemean Games. When Homer wrote of it, he called it selinon, which appears to be the early source of the word celery, though our word came into English (as did so many words, thanks to the Norman Conquest) by way of France, where it was and is celeri.

The ancient Romans used it to decorate tombs and wove it into wreaths that were supposed to ward off hangovers. But they also ate it. While the Romans did develop cultivated celery (though, like modern Italians, they still used the wild for cooking), the techniques for cultivation seem to have vanished with the collapse of the empire. It was not until the Middle Ages that celery was again being cultivated, this time in France. However, celeriac was not developed until the Renaissance.

Popular in Eastern and Southern Europe, celeriac/celery root is not a commonly used vegetable in the US (though it is increasing in popularity). It can be a bit pricey at a regular grocery store, but it’s usually a good bit cheaper if you buy it at an ethnic store that features Eastern European foods, because the demand is greater, as is the turnover.

I think celeriac deserves to be popular. Boiled and puréed, it offers a gentle, silken, subtly celery-flavored, low-carb alternative to mashed potatoes. In soups, it contributes the flavor of celery without the strings, and with a lovely mouth-feel that is more velvety than cooked celery. I love it. And if you want a lovely recipe to try it in, come back in a few days, as my next post will be a recipe for a delightful soup from Poland.

My first experience of the delightful Brazilian snack pão de queijo–Portuguese for “cheese bread,” though it is also often rendered “Brazilian cheese roll”–came during the years I was working with Maria Baez Kijac on her iconic cookbook, The South American Table.It’s a pretty irresistible treat that has the benefit of being gluten free. Maria’s cookbook includes a recipe for the dish, and she taught me how to make it–but life is pretty crazy, between working for a living and caring for my aging mom, plus other activities, and baking has pretty much slipped out of my life. And with Maria now semi-retired, I didn’t think I’d have the chance to enjoy these chewy, cheesy little balls again any time soon.

Fortunately, this last weekend at the National Restaurant Association Show at McCormick Place in Chicago, while I spent most of my time looking at fabulous kitchen equipment (I was there representing Foodservice Equipment Reports, a magazine for which I write with some regularity), I did visit a few of the booths of food vendors, including that of Forno de Minas, a family-owned Brazilian business that not only produces pão de queijo (from a generations-old family recipe), it sells them frozen in U.S. grocery stores. Having been delighted by the samples they were handing out at the show, as soon as I got home, I looked Forno de Minas up online and found that they sell their frozen pão de queijo in several local grocery stores.

For me, this was a happy discovery. For those who might need to be gluten free, this could be a lifesaver. Instead of wheat flour, pão de queijo is made from yuca (also known as cassava or tapioca). While yuca/tapioca/cassava flour is now available in many stores–and really pretty much anywhere, if you have a computer–if you don’t want to tackle making these from scratch, I can assure you that the pão de queijo from Forno de Minas is the next best thing to homemade–and in most cases, even better than homemade, if your home doesn’t come equipped with a Brazilian baker.

Anyway, I do highly recommend the pão de queijo from Forno de Minas, even if you’re not worried about gluten. Really a dandy, flavorful, and rather comforting taste treat.

I love the Townsend’s YouTube channel, as it offers so much insight into where our food traditions originated and how much of what we eat now is anchored in history. In this video, Jon Townsend talks about the difference between Zante currants and Ribes currants and how unlike the two are.

The Ribes currants can be black or red. In the video, Jon mentions that raising black currants was banned in the U.S., and since he didn’t mention why, I figured I’d check that out, and it’s because they carry a disease that threatened to wipe out America’s pine trees. As noted in the video, a few states have lifted the ban, but black currants are still rare. So the Zante currants and red Ribes currants will likely be the only currants you’ll find, though the Zante currants will probably be more readily available. Also, the Zante currants will be found in the grocery store along with raisins, while the red currants, if your store carries them, will likely be fresh or already turned into jam.

In a book I’m reading, I had just encountered with considerable delight a statement that the word “sterling” came from “Easterlings,” a name often given to the upstanding merchants of the Hanseatic League. I was ready to write that up as a Fun Fact, but years of working in publishing made me feel odd about publishing anything without checking another source. Hmm. Webster’s Dictionary said the word probably came from the Old English steorling, from steorra, or star. Okay, so the dictionary says “probably.” Time for a third source.

So on to Britannica. It said “One theory” is that it comes from the silver coins made by the Germanic Easterlings–so referring to their silver rather than their sterling characters. Then it adds “A more plausible derivation” is the steorling mentioned by Webster’s, meaning “coin with a star.”

So, in other words, there is no absolutely certain explanation–the word arose a thousand years ago, and it’s hard to track precisely all influences and language changes going back that far.

One thing I did discover while looking into this, however, is why British money was originally divided up the way it was–and why it was (and is) called a pound. In Anglo-Saxon times, one pound of silver would be coined into 240 pennies. These pennies were 925 parts silver to 75 parts copper (and one still sees 925 stamped on sterling silver). Each silver coin bore a star, and so it was called a steorling, or “coin with a star.” But that means that, at one time, a pound sterling in Britain really was a pound of sterling.

And what does this have to do with food, you might be wondering. Well, the Hanseatic League made their wealth and gained their power from controlling the salt trade for a couple of centuries–back when salt was the only reliable way to preserve food for most people. So almost no story is more than a step or two away from food.

I love markets–those tempting, impressive, generally open-air gatherings of vendors selling things they have grown, caught, made, or traded. Any country I visit, I’ll try to find a good market to explore. I’ve wandered through wonderful markets in dozens of countries, from bright, fragrant Mexican mercados to London’s venerable Borough Market to local farmers’ markets from Egypt to Ecuador, as well as the lovely though generally less bustling gatherings near home.

The title of the post, Night Markets, might conjure images of Asian after-dark markets — such as the Temple Street Night Market in Hong Kong or the Chiang Mai Night Bazaar in Thailand. Loved them both. But what I’m thinking of now is the markets that happen late at night/early in the morning and are geared toward supplying restaurants and grocery stores. Probably the most famous one I’ve visited is the astonishing Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo. But thanks to this video, I now have two new destinations next time I make it to the UK. Of course, this also makes me want to find out what might be happening closer to home–but I haven’t found those yet, so I’ll have to settle for the video. Hope you find this as fascinating as I did.

In the 1700s, chocolate was still a drink (as it always had been among the Aztecs), and it still inhabited the realm of privilege. The British had, in the mid-1600s, hit on the idea of adding milk and sugar, which made it much nicer than it been previously, but in the 1700s, it was still not affordable. Chocolate was costly, and the sugar and spices used to improve its taste were also costly. So the man on the street was not consuming chocolate–but the monarch was. In the Georgian Era, which started with George I, Hampton Court Palace actually had a chocolate kitchen, with a chocolate maker on site, to make sure the King always got his morning chocolate. Wonder what a chocolate kitchen looks like? Well, fortunately, the original chocolate kitchen at Hampton Court has been located and can be visited. But if you’re not near Hampton Court, here’s a video. Think I’ll go get some chocolate.

I think most of us would think fried onion rings were a fairly modern taste treat. That’s probably because the modern, commercial deep-fat fryer is a fairly recent invention, and it is unlikely most people would have had ready access to deep-fried foods before it came along. But as is so often the case in the world of food, many dishes we enjoy today have been enjoyed for a long time. A good example of this is the fried onion rings in this video, which come from an 1801 cookbook. Today, if a chef added Parmesan cheese to a batter for onion rings, it would be hailed as a remarkable innovation, but here that addition was made in a recipe that is more than 200 years old. These look really good.

It was the name of this recipe that caught my eye initially, as I was flipping through an old cookbook. Then, looking over the ingredients, I was definitely interested in trying it. Seriously, anything with melted cheese is going to be pretty good. Rinktum Ditty is something of a spin on Welsh rarebit (or do you say “rabbit”–both terms are ancient and correct), but with tomatoes taking the place of beer.

It appears that Rinktum Ditty came to America from England, specifically from Cheshire. It became associated with New England, but it clearly spread nationwide, even appearing in a 1917 collection of recipes in Arizona.

Some versions call for cooked tomatoes, others for tomato sauce, and a few Depression-era versions used canned tomato soup. I decided to update it a bit, using a can of “petite diced” tomatoes. It made it a bit chunkier, but the flavor of the cheese came through a bit more, and it was thicker and heartier. If you want to try an older version than mine, just use 2 cups of cooked tomatoes in place of the can of diced tomatoes.

The first recipe I ever saw for this simply called for “cheese.” I wondered that no specific kind was named, but after I made it, I realized it was because almost any good melting cheese would work. I used a good, sharp cheddar, but I imagine a nice smoked gouda would be amazing. And since the recipe apparently came from Cheshire, it’s a good bet Cheshire cheese would work.

Because of its antiquity, as it spread, the name got written down phonetically often enough to have created a fair number of spellings, including Rum Tum Ditty, Ring Tum Tiddy, Rink Tum Diddy, and a few other options. But Rinktum Ditty is the most common spelling. It’s an easy dish to prepare, even finding its way into the repertoire of early logging camps on the frontier. And it’s very economical. Some older collections note that, because there is no beer, it is suitable for children. It’s also mighty tasty.

It is traditionally served over toast. Some recipes suggest buttered toast, but I think that’s overkill, with all the cheese in the dish. Some versions specify crackers. I also tried it over pumpernickel, which was great. Enjoy.

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